Held A New Adult Romance(57)

"I know this isn't an easy decision to make," she said.

I sniffed. "Understatement."

"We offer a full range of counseling services here, whatever your decision. Also a full free STD screening."

I nodded slowly. "Why would I...?"

"It's usually recommended," she said, folding her hands.

"I'm not a slut, if that's what you're saying."

"No, that's not what I'm saying at all. We offer free STD screening and rape counseling as part of the service."

"Who said I was raped?" I said, scowling at her, but her face said it all. And my defensiveness was just the final nail in the coffin. I still wasn't ready to admit that he'd done something to me without my consent. You couldn't ask consent for every little thing in bed, could you? Really? It seemed absurd.

She told me I had time to think about it, and that I should, so I went home with nothing taken out of me except for a couple of vials of blood and some pee. I was still pregnant. The worst part was that I didn't feel a bit relieved. If this was a Lifetime movie then surely this was the moment when I decided to keep the baby, and raise it as a triumphant single supermom. Only that didn't happen. I just felt like an immovable obstacle to the rest of my own life.

The next few days were rough. I stayed in bed and stared at the TV. Everything felt unreal, like I was moving through a thick fog. Nothing really connected with me - not the pictures on the TV screen, not the flavor of the food that Everglade kept trying to make me eat. I was so far sunk in apathy that I didn't care that she was screening my calls - she must have been, I figured, since Justin had gone quiet.

Then the clinic called and told me I had gonorrhea.

I called Justin. It went to voicemail so I figured I'd leave him a little something, just like he'd left me. I think I said something like "Congratulations - you have an STD," and probably told him to fuck himself. It felt like the last straw. Knocked up, dropped out and diseased - a perfect trifecta of suck.

Everglade asked me if I was thinking about killing myself, but I told her not to worry. I honestly wasn't. Suicide would have required some level of self-hate, and self-hate would have required a mental effort that was currently beyond me. I had nothing more to give - no more anger, no more outrage, no more pain.

Justin turned up one day when she was out – another one of those weird little twists of fate that made me wonder if somewhere there was another universe where I was okay and he was still alive. If Everglade had been there...well. When they told me afterwards I wondered if in that universe she and I were both dead.

He looked tired and beyond unhappy; that is to say he looked so much like I felt that I took pity on him and let him in. Or maybe I felt I owed him. After all, I was carrying his kid, and his disease.

I don’t know. It was stupid. You know the expression ‘misery loves company’? It was like that. If we couldn’t be happy together then we’d rather be miserable together than apart.

He followed me into the kitchen and I started to make coffee. For once he sat quiet, defeated. When I turned back to him he looked like he’d been gouged out, and there was nothing left but a sort of exhausted, confused emptiness. Or maybe I was just projecting.

I tried to figure out what to say - how many other girls were there? Why did you take the condom off? Have you had a test? Did you get antibiotics? A million and one things I couldn't say, because they all sounded so clinical, so practical. None of them touched on what I really wanted to say and I didn't have the words for them anyway, not at the time. Why are you here? Why are you determined to take everything that I have, everything that I am, when you can see as well as I can that neither of us have anything left to give?

Instead I said, "You look tired."

He looked up at me with this expression of awful, aching need, his eyes filled with such loneliness that my heart - the heart I thought had gone cold and dead as ashes - swelled and stung in sympathy. "I can't sleep without you," he said.

I started to cry, partly because I hurt and partly because I was relieved to hurt at all. And I knew what he meant. I couldn't count the number of nights I'd lain awake, missing him, missing the way he curled around me like I was a treasure. He got up from the table and took my hands, and I cried all the harder, only to have him kiss away the tears. "I'm sorry," he kept saying. "I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I love you so much."

We went to bed then. I let him reinfect me and didn't care - just so long as he kept me held in his arms. I cried over the sob stories he'd fed me, the ones that let me see him as a lonely, abandoned little boy who needed nothing more than my love.